It’s raining and the windows are open in the house. Though I am cooking a pot of beans, I smell the scent of the hyacinth flowers drifting inside. I’m thinking of mother’s beans and cornbread with slices of onion and garden-fresh tomato on the side.

Summers in the late 1950s:

I remember helping mother cook beans, iron a basket full of sprinkled clothes, mostly khaki uniforms, and not blinking twice over working in hundred-degree heat in the square, flat-top, concrete house dad built on E. Vine Street in Webb City, Missouri.

Eventually, after the supper dishes are done and the adults are watching television, I will escape outside and take a long walk. (If I am lucky, my girlfriend Barbara will walk with me.) Anywhere, I want to go. I step around hundreds of dreams, then go to my room and read skyscraper words that build fantastic worlds by authors like Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Victor Hugo, and Mark Twain.

I love the sounds of the bullfrogs and crickets growing louder as night closes in and a breeze crawls inside over the window sill, and I am lying on my bed with a book open to the next page.

What an evocative description! My mother cooked pinto beans often, and we ate them with cornbread and sliced tomatoes. Did you or anyone in your family crumble cornbread into a glass of milk or buttermilk and have it for dessert?

You really are a good writer. Reading your blog, I felt the heat of the day, and the cool of the evening. Read both of your books. I could see you as the main character in both. Looking forward to your future stories….and keep them coming!